The Story of an American Boy

The following is something my great-grandfather Louis Wagner wrote. I’ve preserved the capitalization and spelling but I’ve inserted some sentence terminiations and speculations for words that were indecipherable in the original.

My Grandparents on both sides emigrated to American in 1833. They were on a sailing ship 3 months before they landed in New York and came to St. Louis in Wagons. When my grandfather on my fathers side arrived here someone offered to sell him 2 blocks of ground near 3 and Walnut St. for 200.00 dollars but my grandfather wanted ground he could farm so refused the offer¹. At that time 4 Street was the city limit and beyond 6 St. there was wilderness. Both of my grandfathers took up land in St. Clair, Ills. The farm on which my mother was born is still in the hands of a grandchild, I never got a Clear Idea where my father was born but he was born on the farm owned by my grandfather. My father was born in 1841. In 1849 there were 7 children when the Colery² hit them. With my grandmother to³ sick to be told 5 children died and were buried in one week. You can imagine what that meant when my grandmother got strong enough to ask about the Children for there were only 2 left, my father, and an older sister. About 3 years later another boy was born about 1852 after whom I was named. My mother spent an uneventful life on the farm with her father were⁴ she was
born in 1844 doing housework and farm chores untill 1866 when she married my father. But to get back to my father, in those days everyone had a church suit which was put on just before leaving for church and as soon as they got back home it was carefully taken off, brushed, and stowed away for next Sunday. Now my father did not like to go to church. He would sooner stay at home on the farm and play indian and ride the horses bareback and by the way there was a massacre of whits⁵ only a short time before my grandfather settled in Ills. Some said it was Indians while others said it was the Mormons passing through in their Pilgrimage to Utah but to go back to my father he was dissatisfied and ran away from home when he was 12 years old and never communicated with his parents. For five years he was going from one place to another working as he could find work. When my grandfather settled here there was no proper road between the bluff and the river. Alton, Ills and St. Louis had just about the same number of inhabitants and there was no telling which ever was the best Place to locate in. Then later a company was formed which laid out a road and surfaced a road and surfaced it with Macadam and charged a toll for the use of it, and many farmers in trying to avoid the toll would go through the lowland, some getting by allright but others had a lot of trouble unloading their wagons, getting them out of the mire, then loading them again, then going over the toll road after all. During this time there was and⁶ Island in front of St. Louis called the bloody Island⁷ because it was not Claimed by Missouri or Illinois so many went there to fight duals and it seemed the river could not make up its minde on which to put its current so St. Louis and St. Clair Co. got together to build a dike from the east shore to the Island thus Permanently putting the river back in front of St. Louis, for St. Louis had feared a shifting of the Channell of the river to the other side of the Island then the Sloughs were formed just east of the river front on the east side. Some time in the five years he was away from home he pushed a wheelbarrow with Micadem in it for this dike although he was still very young. When about 17 my father went home and stayed there untill the civil war.

He served two hitches in the Civil War in the 59th Illinois Infantry Regiment, eventually rising to the rank of captain. I’ve got a picture of him in his captain’s uniform somewhere around here and I’ll post it one of these days.

I’ll also try to scan the original of this document and post it up here.

¹ That’s essentially where the Arch is now in St. Louis. If my great-great-great-grandfather had taken the deal I might be a wealthy man today.
² In 1849 there was a cholera pandemic that killed people in Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
³ too?
⁴ where?
⁵ whites?
⁶ an?
⁷ Thomas Hart Benton killed Charles Lucas in a duel on Bloody Island.